Monica Wood Books in Order

If you want her newest book-club fiction: How to Read a Book → The One-in-a-Million Boy
If you prefer Maine family and community stories: Ernie’s Ark → Any Bitter Thing → My Only Story
If you want the memoir first: When We Were the Kennedys
If you’re a writer looking for craft help: Description → The Pocket Muse → The Pocket Muse 2

Monica Wood was born on August 16, 1953, in Mexico, Maine, a paper-mill town in western Maine. She grew up in a large Irish-Catholic family of storytellers, with the mill always nearby and family life shaped by work, faith, music, and talk.

She found words early. At four, she was already writing letters to an older sister away at college, and reading became one of the steady pleasures of her childhood.

Writing took a while to become the job. Before her first novel appeared when she was 40, Wood worked as a nurse aide, an insurance clerk, a club singer, and a high school guidance counselor. She began her writing life with short stories, and that attention to the small turns of ordinary lives still shows in her fiction.

Her first novel, Secret Language, follows two sisters trying to understand the damage and comfort of their shared past. My Only Story brings together a hairdresser, a lonely stranger, and a family secret, while Any Bitter Thing looks at faith, accusation, and the deep pull of childhood memory.

Then came Abbott Falls.

In Ernie’s Ark, Wood created a fictional Maine paper-mill town under pressure from a strike, and the place feels close to the world she knew growing up. Her memoir, When We Were the Kennedys, returned directly to Mexico, Maine, and to 1963, the year her father died suddenly and President Kennedy was assassinated. The book is personal, but it also remembers a town where mill work, Catholic school, neighbors, and family stories were tightly braided together.

Her later novels widened her readership without leaving those core concerns behind. The One-in-a-Million Boy builds a friendship between an 11-year-old Boy Scout, his troubled father, and Ona Vitkus, a 104-year-old Lithuanian immigrant. How to Read a Book follows three people connected by a prison book club, a fatal accident, and an awkward chance meeting in a Portland bookstore. Readers tend to respond to Wood’s care for flawed people who keep reaching for connection even when they don’t know how.

She writes about family, but not only the family we’re born into. Again and again, her books gather people from broken or spare parts: sisters, widowers, former prisoners, mill workers, old friends, priests, children, and strangers who become necessary to one another.

Wood has also written books for writers, including Description, The Pocket Muse, and The Pocket Muse 2, and her plays have been staged at Portland Stage. She lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband, Dan Abbott. When she isn’t writing or meeting readers, she is often birdwatching, which feels just about right for someone who pays such close attention.